Alanis Morissette nostalgic for the ’90s? Not!

The Spice Girls at the Olympic closing ceremony! The return of Backstreet Boys and 98 Degrees! The combination of Everclear, Sugar Ray, Gin Blossoms and more for something called the Summerland tour — a time capsule of frosted tips and Big Shiny Tunes compilations if ever there was one.

But as Canadian contributions to the decade’s pop culture go, few can match Alanis Morissette’s. Her 1995 record, Jagged Little Pill, sold some 33 million copies worldwide, and has the distinction of being the highest-selling debut by a female artist in the U.S. (Here in Canada, she’d released two albums of teen pop domestically prior to Jagged: Alanis and Now Is The Time – important in retrospect, if only because they inspired How I Met Your Mother’s Robin Sparkles.) She was a superstar: winning Grammys (she has seven), and Junos (she has 12) and inspiring little girls to pick up guitars (or maybe just dabble in yoga or veganism).

Is Morissette, now 38, as nostalgic as the rest of us?

“Um, no!”

Morissette clearly has a sense of humour about the era that made her a star, but she’s not joking.

“I mean, I love Eddie Vedder. And I miss Kurt Cobain,” she continues — speaking in the stoner drawl of a Wayne’s World character. (There’s another ‘90s reference for you.) “But no, I’m not nostalgic for the ‘90s. No!”

Why not?

“Because I like to live in what’s going on right now.”

Well, right now, Morissette is preparing to release a new album — her eighth, Havoc and Bright Lights (out Aug. 28) — and she sits in a Toronto hotel suite, the ‘90s grunge ironed out of her hair, to spend the day talking about its origins.

A string of international tour dates are already set (she travels through South America in September before returning to North America; Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal will host her in October). And a first single, the appropriately bright sounding “Guardian,” debuted in May. Entertainment Weekly, you’ll forgive them, said the song “feels like old-school Alanis.”

Havoc is her first record since 2008’s Flavors of Entanglement, though — which is perhaps a long time for someone who loves living in the moment. As Morissette explains, she meant to start work much sooner. But then life happened.

Morissette married Mario Treadway, who raps under the name MC Souleye in May 2010. They had their first child together, Ever Imre Morissette Treadway, on Christmas Day 2010. “Guardian,” which finds Morissette taking the role of a fierce protector, was written with their little boy in mind.

“I wanted to write the record while I was pregnant,” she says of Havoc. “But at 3 p.m. every day I was down for the count,” she says, explaining that the pregnancy was draining all her energy. “I had all these naïve notions of wanting to do so much work while I was pregnant and I quickly realized that wasn’t going to be happening,” she says with a quiet chuckle. “So I was dying to write this record, I was TEEMING.”

About five months after giving birth, Morissette says she was ready to work again — but she also knew she didn’t want to leave her newborn son.

“He comes with me everywhere,” says Morissette, who’s also become something of a mommy blogger, writing about attachment parenting for Huffington Post and iVillage. This interview was even delayed so she could take care of her baby’s late-afternoon feeding.

The solution was to build a “makeshift” recording studio in her Los Angeles home. “It was the only way I could cuddle and be available but also write songs,” she says.

Producer and Flavors of Entanglement collaborator Guy Sigsworth was called in from London, England. “I just made the phone call to Guy, who has two kids, so he totally got it.”

And while she says “40 to 50 per cent” of the record was written and recorded in her home, the rest was finished between Sigsworth’s London studio and at L.A.’s Sunset Sound with producer Joe Chiccarelli (U2, Tori Amos).

“Basically, 1 p.m. every day ‘til about 4 p.m., I would just commit to this process and what that looked like is just everybody in the house knew that my son was my priority,” she says. “He was just born, so — so if the door knocked or if he needed me in any way, that would trump everything. But we write the songs relatively quickly, so we never needed to interrupt the process, not even once.”

As in the case of her previous records, Morissette looked to journal entries for songwriting ideas.

“A lot of the time a song is started by just one sentence or a theme of what I want to write about,” she explains — and hot topics included misogyny (“Woman Down”), the trappings of fame (“Celebrity”) and love and marriage.

While 2008’s Flavors of Entanglement was widely reported as being borne out of Morissette’s split from former fiancé Ryan Reynolds, Havoc features several glowing, soft-rock tributes to her husband, including “’Til You” and “Empathy.”

“In the past I’ve dated people who, whether they were aware they were doing it or not, they were clipping my wings and clipping my cape off over time, and so my husband was the opposite. … So I had to sing about that,” she says. “I wanted to talk about the virtues of committed monogamous relationship, which I’m a huge fan of. I’ve always known intellectually I wanted to do that, but I couldn’t nail it until now.”

If there’s anything remotely ‘90s about Havoc, it’s just the way Morissette approached it. “Regardless of what is being welcomed or what is most popular in pop culture, I just keep doing what I do,” she says. “I just keep chronicling my life.”